Images and invocation for Brigid, Bride,Brighid, Brigit

Poem for Brigid

Hail and welcome Brigid
Goddess of the North East
Come Bride
Bless this hearth
With life and light
With milk and mead
With the flame of poetry
Forged in craft and fire
And the soft white light of healing
As the crone washes in the sparkling well
And is reborn anew
Welcome Brigid
Bride of Spring
As you emerge pale and fragile
From dark winter's loam
And sing to us in a quiver of bare branches
And a shiver of sun
Fingering your way between snow clouds and rain
Floating on icy tides
Lady of Swans
Your breath soft as down
Whispers
Flickers
Inspires
Desires

Samhain

Samhain

The sea churns and spews
Her leather tongue
Licks hollows
Weed heaves a stink and
Sticks scatter like bones
This clawing of tides
Gnaws night’s womb
Weeping widow of the west
You shadow my stride uphill
Cocooned in your seal hide veil

Rooks fall and glide
I reach the top
Stragglings of memory scratch
In spare blackthorn
A mildew of blackberries
Spills its cach of flies
Upon a stile

The sun’s weak and dribbling eye
Strains grey brows seaward
Fields are furrowed mud
The cow’s eye bodes blood
This stile path stalls in green slurry
A block of wintering barns
Shorn bleak
Calves chomp dry straw

I am at standstill
No map
Hedging my bets
The track winds through
Paul with its tower
A falling crown
Crucified figures in crosses
A solitary sunflower
In a cabbage field

The cores of apples
Strewn on the path
Your ghost in the last seeds
Fading with the brittle petals of hydrangeas.

Saturday, 31 October 2009

West

Curl in your barnacled shell
Hug craggy shores
Coracle queen
Swathed in waves
Dowsed in salt spray
The mermaids are singing
Far out in night waters
And seals siren on the deep
Your heart unfurls in a weedy pool of longing
And desire sweeps her anemone fronds
Bled under the moon
And weeping
Ride ride your indigo tides
Dolphin arced
Dance mad with the flow
Downstream
Slippery water birth
Silver wriggling blue
Little fish
Webbed and gilled
Gasp into being